When you hear this sound
something bad is probably about to happen.
This sound is what TV Tropes calls
the Drone of Dread.
No, not attack drones
or those robots flying in the air,
or a male honeybee, or that part of a bagpipe.
Drones.
Like the sustained sound that can be
a low or high frequency.
How composers create
the Drone of Dread can vary.
But some version of it is used
in almost every thriller, horror movie, or suspenseful drama.
New technology has made it possible
to mix sounds in new ways,
helping make drones more common.
- It's a sound of dread
and that is something that I think
triggers fear in all kinds of creatures.
And the dread that the drone represents:
our real life anxieties, rendered through sound.
I'm Adam Epstein.
This is Quartz.
Please subscribe to our channel.
This might be the very first drone sound
created specifically for film.
It's part of what's considered to be
one of the very first horror film scores.
- It's 'Jekyll and Hyde' that begins this
tradition of the horror film
doing really unsettling effects
with the sound and the music together.
And these sustained sort of mysterious sounds
that you can sort of identify,
but can't quite identify.
It creates a really uncanny effect.
Neil Lerner is a musicologist at Davidson College in North Carolina.
He's studied music in film for over 20 years.
He even wrote a book on how sounds
build fear in horror films.
Neil says that films use the drone sound
specifically to make viewers feel uncomfortable
in their seats.
- The way Drones often work is that they just build up tension
and in their unwavering qualities in the way
it just keeps on giving that same sound.
That reaction of feeling tension or something.
Some sort of unease over that is what it's there to do.
One example is the iconic, disturbing droning
you hear several times throughout '2001: A Space Odyssey'.
That music was just, you know, listeners
wouldn't know what to make of that.
It doesn't have rhythm really,
it doesn't have melody.
I mean it's just sort of a mass of sound
that might, it might start on this pitch
and stuff might just start to build on top of it.
The drone tends to pop up most often in films
during moments of great global anxiety and unrest.
'Space Odyssey', for instance, came out
at the height of the space race,
when the world was blanketed in anxiety
about new technology
that could take over—or destroy—civilization.
Even at the time of 'Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde'
the world was facing a major depression.
The worries and fear around the Cold War
Brought out intense, foreboding drone sounds
in films like 'Eraserhead' and 'The Thing'.
And more recently,
the drone is getting at our deeper anxieties,
in a society dominated by technology,
and questions of loneliness and self worth.
Take the social network.
- And each of these have their own relationship to the drone pitch.
So he's playing with mostly stable harmonies in here.
They're all the other sounds that he starts to put into the mix
that make it sound more unstable
and unsettling as it goes on.
But to reach our deepest fears and anxieties
the drone must go beyond just a film's music score.
- We would take these segments of his score
and then start using them in other places
where they weren't originally intended to.
Because it was such a perfect element of anxiety
that we started building other scenes and other areas
where they didn't originally discuss to use it.
Lewis Goldstein and Tom Ryan mixed and edited
the sound for the hit 2018 horror film 'Hereditary'.
- So that you know,.
that's just the drone without anything, this is our drone.
It's always there, subtly.
Especially when the music goes away you hear it much more.
They worked closely with composer Colin Stetson's score
to make the sounds that calibrate the tension
and dread in the film.
- Why is it, why do they work so well?
- The non-wavering, you know,
and when I say wavering I mean if something
that goes on for so long,
it just affects you.
The late Johann Johansson created drone sounds
so overwhelming, that they cause rooms to shake.
Like this one from 'Arrival'.
These low humming drones make us anxious.
Playing directly into our subconscious as humans.
- It triggers something just hard wired into us,
as physical creatures that used to run around in the forest
and flee from predators,
and of being able to detect
just through these vibrations,
as huge creatures from miles away
are pounding towards us.
That films have been so effective
at connecting the drone to anxiety,
may tell us something about our modern world.
- Tying it into the sort of zeitgeist,
into the sort of just
the general feeling of 2019
and apocalypticism, and climate change,
and all this stuff,
like, the world has a drone going on right now.
We can feel this unease in the 'Dark Knight',
which opens with an obvious drone
that then sets the mood for the rest of the film.
- Just complete psychological unease.
I think it's a great sonic symbol for it.
There are problems that we've known about
for a long time,
that we're just letting that drone on.
- That's terrifying.
- It is really terrifying.
The drone has found its way off the screen
and into real life too, in terrifying ways.
Thousands of people around the world
have reported hearing a bizarre, low-frequency sound
in a phenomenon known only as "the hum".
- The worldwide hum is usually described as a low-pitched rumble.
And scientists, still, aren't totally sure of the cause.
Maybe it's mass hysteria.
Maybe it's just tennitis.
Or maybe it's the Drone of Dread,
ever present, a herald of our impending doom.
Have you noticed the drone of dread in movies?
Or maybe in real life?
Tell us about it in the comments and follow us on Facebook.
Next week Quartz takes a look at what could be
the future of meat — real, lab-grown meat.